The strong pound and the lingering effects of the UK's deepest postwar recession led to a drop in overseas travel for the fourth successive year in 2010.

Official figures released on Thursday showed there was a fall of more than 5% in visits abroad by UK residents last year, following an even bigger 15% decline during 2009, when economic activity contracted by 5%.

The Office for National Statistics said holidays to the UK had hit their highest levels since data was first collected 50 years ago, with visits boosted by the 25% drop in the value of the pound since the start of the financial crisis in 2007.

"Although holiday visits to the UK have seen continued growth in recent years, there has been a substantial decline in visits abroad as factors such as the global recession and weak exchange rates dampened traveller demand, in particular during 2009."

Visits abroad by UK residents tripled in the 20 years from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, peaking at just under 69.5m in 2006. The ONS said that by last year, the number of visits had fallen by 20% to 55.6m. Spending abroad during the same period, when adjusted for inflation, dipped from £31bn to £22bn. Spain and France remained comfortably the most popular destination for UK travellers, with France, Germany and the United States providing most visitors to Britain.

Despite the fall in the number of Britons going abroad, the UK still runs a hefty deficit in overseas travel. In the 1970s, the UK ran a small surplus but the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 led, during the 1980s, to a ever-widening gap between spending by UK holidaymakers abroad and that by visitors to the UK. This deficit hit £20bn in 2008, but was down to £15bn in 2010.

Looking back over the past half century, the ONS said visits to the UK had grown from 1.9m in 1961 to 29.8m in 2010, a 15-fold increase, while visits abroad increased from 3.3 million to 55.6 million, a 16-fold increase. In the early 1960s, when the MCC cricket team to Australia travelled by ship, just over half of visits abroad were by air, but this has now increased to nearly 80%.

The ONS said the average length of stay on visits to the UK in 2010 was 7.6 nights in 2010, approximately half of the average in 1970. Forty years ago, North America accounted for nearly 30% of overseas visitors to the UK, but the percentage has dipped to 11.4% as a result of Britain's closer links with Europe since joining the European Economic Community in 1973.

London attracts more than 10 times the number of visitors than Edinburgh, the second most visited city in the UK by travellers from overseas. Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow were the three next most popular destinations, the ONS said.

The most visited countries by UK residents in 2010 were as follows:

1 Spain 10.4 million visits

2 France 9.1 million

3 USA 3.2 million

4 Ireland 3.0 million

5 Italy 2.2 million

6 Germany 2.1 million

7 Portugal 1.9 million

8 Turkey 1.8 million

9 Netherlands 1.8 million

10 Greece 1.7 million

The countries whose residents provided most visits to the UK in 2010 were: